the time between rulers; a space between; the gap after one epoch ends and another begins; the tumultuous and exciting period after scholarly boundaries become fluid and before new academic disciplines are fully defined; the blog of New York University's Draper Program

This symposium examines visual culture in Italy and Germany in the years of transition from dictatorship and World War Two. This period, roughly 1945 to 1955, has often been treated through the lens of forward-looking Cold War historiographies that reflect an investment in 1945 as a “year zero.” The sympo­sium will reflect the newest research in this direction, but will consider how visual culture also expressed experiences of loss, disorientation, and victimization brought on by war and the end of dictatorship in Germany and Italy. Visual culture in particular can be a privileged source for the exploration of the dramatic contrasts between idealism and despair that marked this com­plex period in both Italian and German history. The tensions be­tween processes of unmaking and remaking a national past, set within a broader context of the negotiation of American and other foreign influences, figure heavily in Italian and German visual culture of the period.